<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>In the Guise of Those we Love by wyrmy</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28259586">In the Guise of Those we Love</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyrmy/pseuds/wyrmy'>wyrmy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Battlestar Galactica (2003)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angels, Character Study, Disassociation, F/M, Major Spoilers, Other, Set during season 4, Theology, Vignettes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:02:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,319</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28259586</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyrmy/pseuds/wyrmy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it mean to be an angel in the BSG universe? What's it like?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sam Anders/Kara "Starbuck" Thrace</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>In the Guise of Those we Love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Content warning for gore, horror, trauma, disassociating during sex, and generally most of the things that Kara went through in season 4.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Kara Thrace was dead. Her soul crossed the river with that grim ferryman that poets write of and passed into the kingdom of eternal night. Or something.</p><p>*</p><p>It’s not possible to visualize what an angel looks like. Not in the sense that their bodies don’t have a Euclidean geometry, though they don’t, or because they are too blindingly brilliant to even look at. It’s more that they’re not real in the way we’re real. They don’t (necessarily) have physical bodies the way that we do. The way that Kara did. </p><p>There was an angel, a servant or thrall, or maybe operative, agent, messenger, of that thing which is sometimes called God and sometimes called Fate. When Kara Thrace died, the angel put on a facsimile of her body, a facsimile of her memories, of her mind. It wore her mind like a corset or a bra. It changed shape inside its container.</p><p>*</p><p>Kara could remember the Maelstrom. She could remember Lee following her into it, yelling at her in her earpiece. And she could remember Earth, and taking photos of it. </p><p>But it was… uh…. Blurry? Unreal? She knew Lee had been screaming at her, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what he was saying. How had she felt inside that storm? What had compelled her to go in? Thoughts like that gave her a headache. Kara knew from personal experience that if thinking about something hurt, you should just stop thinking about it. </p><p>She thought about Earth instead. </p><p>Well. Not what you’d really call thinking. </p><p>Kara knew where it was. Not specifically, not in the sense of being able to list off co-ordinates or something like that.</p><p>Before Caprica had gotten nuked to shit, the event pretentious people were now calling The Fall, there had been several species there which had a biological drive to migrate to particular regions at different times of the year. Sometimes they had (so she’d heard) something in their heads which allowed them to feel or perceive the magnetic field of the planet. That’s what Earth felt like. Like a piece of magnetized shrapnel in her skull that oriented her due North. </p><p>So when the Galactica jumped in the Wrong Direction it was as if something more physical than her body, more intrinsic to her than her soul was trying to pull her towards light and goodness, towards home, while she was dragged unwillingly away. </p><p>The thing that was and was not Kara Thrace screamed and threw herself against the floor of the brig. </p><p>*</p><p>Kara was pacing again. She paced until her feet got sore, walking probably the equivalent of miles per day back and forth in the shitty little room that was quarters and ready room for the Demetrius’ captain. Kara couldn’t have stood still even if she’d wanted to. The pull towards Earth that had been so painfully strong in the beginning (beginning of what?) had ebbed until it was only a slight discomfort, like the feeling of having your sock rotate in your boot. Like the tides of Kara’s dead home world, it had pulled itself back to reveal a vast expanse of empty sand.</p><p> The emptiness was unbearable.</p><p>Kara ate little, slept little, and yet her energy was extremely high. She had to go somewhere, but she didn’t know which direction. She had things to do, but she didn’t know what they were. If she had been searching for a physical object, she would have torn the plating right off the inner walls of the ship just to find it. She would have used her teeth.  But Kara was searching for a feeling.</p><p>Sam came to see her. </p><p>Ever since she’d come back from Earth he’d been visiting, sometimes not doing anything other than talking casually about whatever. Gossip, that sort of thing. </p><p>Today they had sex. It was odd, how removed Kara felt from it. She was aware of what was going on, she enjoyed it, physically. She watched, powerless, as her body acted out the signals of desire and passion. The noises that Sam would be expecting, that he might like to hear. She didn’t feel in charge of it, precisely, but she was aware that she could have not acted. She could have just gone unfeelingly through the motions.</p><p>She loved Sam.</p><p>But maybe she didn’t love him Like That.</p><p>*</p><p>Kara stood in the middle of a field. The grass was yellow. It looked like blonde hair. Like the blonde hair on the corpse. </p><p>Leoben was gone. The coward had run away when he’d seen the… body. He’d tripped over something hidden in the long grass and Kara had felt the distant urge to laugh at him. Everything was funny when you found out you were dead. Everything, and nothing was.</p><p>The body looked like it had been there for a while, as the face was mostly rotted away, although the helmet had protected the scalp and therefore that unmistakable hair. Cause of death was difficult to determine, but if the viper had come in hot enough to shatter like that human bones wouldn’t have stood much of a chance either. There were probably some vertebrae broken in the neck, though an autopsy would-</p><p>Would not happen.</p><p>The frak was Kara meant to do? Call in the discovery of her own body and wait around for people to pick it up? Get put in the brig again as a Cylon spy?</p><p>She sat down facing the cockpit, unable to tear her eyes away from her own rotten corpse. </p><p>A few months ago, her sense of purpose had burned inside of her until she felt like the light would glow through her skin, shine out of her mouth like a beacon, light up her eyes until they were like floodlights. Now she looked at that skin, grey and corrupted, those empty eye sockets. </p><p>Today, on a planet even more desolate than the nuclear wastelands of the Twelve Colonies the entire human race had lost every bit of hope they had had. </p><p>When Kara stood it was dark. She went back to where Raptors had landed and grabbed a tarp. She dragged it back through the dead, grey woodland, wrapped her own body in it, carried, dragged, and pushed that weight until she found a deserted part of the beach. She built her own pyre and lit it, watched it burn until Kara Thrace’s body was unidentifiable ashes. She said a prayer, not because she really believed it, but because Kara Thrace might have. She could remember believing once. </p><p>She’d believed in a just universe. She’d believed she deserved to suffer. It was only when she’d seen everyone else suffer that she started to think maybe the gods were a bunch of sick bastards. </p><p>Maybe they always had been, who knew.</p><p>*</p><p>The hillside was beautiful, more beautiful than any place Kara could remember being. The grass was green and rippling, the mountains were majestic in the distance, and Kara understood like she never had before. One second she was talking to Lee about his future plans, and the next she Knew, as if she had known all along, as if it had been blindingly obvious but she had refused to see it.</p><p>She was an angel, and her role was to help humanity, to guide them, to live among for the brief time she had the privilege. </p><p>She was also Kara Thrace. She remembered the things Kara Thrace had lived through, she knew the things Kara Thrace had known, she felt the things Kara Thrace had felt.<br/>
Her last thought before she became something both greater and less than human was, “Kara, you did alright, really, didn’t you?” </p><p>Whether that thought was directed towards her angelic self or towards the woman who died before she even really existed, Kara couldn’t say. Perhaps it was meant for both.</p><p>Then the hillside was empty, save for Lee.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>